Managing Physical Distancing Through 5G and Accelerated Edge Cloud

Specific 5G Release 17 work items are dealing with critical medical applications. Moreover, the adoption of mobile health (m-health) and e-health has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper first examines the requirements of critical medical applications that 5G is expected to support. Then it illustrates possible data protection, management, and privacy issues. Finally, it shows a first implementation of an m-health framework supporting physical distance management. Experimental results show that, by exploiting 5G connectivity and the computing capacity provided by an accelerated edge cloud, the proposed framework can detect physical distance violations faster than a user equipment (UE)-based implementation, while saving UE energy.